Benchmark Assignment – Heritage Assessment

Benchmark Assignment – Heritage Assessment When clinically assessing patients in care settings, it is paramount for health professionals to elicit pertinent information that could be crucial for delivery of care. This is particularly important in the United States because the increasing diversity in racial and ethnic composition of the population has presented cultural challenges that care givers must navigate to provide culturally competent service. Cultural competence during delivery of care requires sensitivity to the cultural, social, and linguistic needs of patients (Betancourt, Green, Carrillo, 2002). As a consequence, care providers need cultural assessment tools that will enable them to elicit sensitive racial and ethnic information. The Heritage Assessment Tool provides care givers with such a tool. This paper examines the application of this tool on three different cultures and discusses its usefulness in planning for the maintenance, protection, and restoration of the health of diverse cultures. Three families of Mexican American, European American, and African American heritages were assessed using the Heritage Assessment Tool. The tool consists of 29 questions that determine how deeply an individual identifies with a certain tradition and answers to the questions provide cues on patients’ health traditions. The tool is based on the understanding that all patients are unique cultural beings, with personal health traditions and affected by cultural phenomena (Spector, 2013). The tool reveals an individual’s traditional health and illness beliefs and practices, and is important in deciding the suitable community care resources (p. 376-378). After performing a heritage assessment on the Mexican American, European American, and African American families, common health traditions based on cultural were